South Holland District Council leader and Local Government Association chairman Gary Porter says the Government was “foolish” to ask the EU membership question of the British people when it didn’t know what the result was likely to be.
The UK voted 52 per cent to 48 per cent to leave the European Union in Thursday’s referendum.
Coun Porter (Conservative) believes the Remain campaign’s downfall was not mobilising enough supporters to actually cast their vote.
Turnout nationally was 71.8 per cent (more than 30 million people), which was the highest at a UK election since 1992.
“The polling information that I had seen was that the turnout was going to be higher and the turnout was always going to drive up the Remain campaign,” he said. “They needed it closer to 80 per cent and that didn’t materialise. That is down to the people who marshalled the Stay campaign.”
Coun Porter said the result in South Holland – more than two in two in three of those that voted choosing Leave – was not a surprise but he had anticipated an overall win for Remain.
He said on Friday: “If you had asked me the day before yesterday how it would go I would have said Remain would have won by low 50s percentage.
“Once I saw the Newcastle result (Remain support by one per cent) replicated I thought Leave would win and if you’d asked me at 2.30am this morning I would have said it would be by a bigger margin than it was.”
Coun Porter said it was important that the Government now quickly gets into action with the exit process.
“There needs to be very quickly a plan of how this is going to be delivered in a way that meets the public’s expectation.
“Some people now appear to be distancing themselves from some of the campaign rhetoric, but Government asked the question – foolishly when they didn’t know the answer – and now it must deliver on the outcome.
“That is going to be easier in places like South Holland where the vote was something like two-and-a-half to one than in other places where the difference was only a few hundred votes.
“Telling people they will have to accept something and then actually getting them to accept it are two different things.
“This is not like a General Election result where the people have the chance to change things in four or five years’ time.”
Coun Porter had agreed, along with other leading figures of the Local Government Association, not to publicly express whether they supported Remain or Leave so as to be able to work with other bodies post-referendum without any possible ill feeling.
He said: “It’s fair to say that [whichever way I voted] would have made no difference whatsoever in South Holland.”
